https://teachhoops.com/
Tryout season is here, and Coach Collins frames the stakes right away: the two most important days for a high school coach are the day you pick your staff and the day you pick your team. At the youth level, the day you pick your team is just as big. Tryouts matter.
Youth basketball has several flavors and you do not always get to choose. Sometimes you are assigned players by area. Sometimes it is a snake draft. Sometimes it is a club tryout where you evaluate and then pick. And sometimes you are the one running the tryout, sometimes you are only evaluating, and sometimes you are stuck doing both. Coach Collins has done all three and says the variables change your approach every time.
There are also league quirks worth knowing. In Little League, Coach Collins' son Drew was slotted at a certain round and Coach Collins forfeited that round's pick to keep him. His own father worked the same system a generation earlier, drafting the other best player in each of his sons' classes as an assistant coach, and won the city three or four years running. Coach Bill had a similar situation with a set of very good twins that cost him two picks.
Will the kid actually show up? This is Coach Bill's first filter, and he has been burned. He once used a first round pick on a soccer player who was the best athlete on the floor and made maybe one game all season. Lose that pick and your number one is effectively the tenth best player. He now asks parents directly what other sports the kid is playing in season, and which one is the priority. Some boards he has served on added it to the registration questions.
Coach Collins adds the nuance: showing up because a parent is busy is a different problem than showing up because soccer is at the same time. And there is more variability with younger kids. A nine year old might want to be at basketball practice, but if the parents already committed to soccer, that kid is going to soccer. By seventeen, the player gets more say.
Effort, focus, and attention to detail. Coach Collins tells the Drake Baldwin story. Baldwin, now the starting catcher for the Braves, did not have a great tryout at nine years old and slid to the second or third round. Coach Collins picked him because he saw love for the game and effort where other coaches saw the miss. He was Baldwin's first Little League coach, and Baldwin's mom still has that first over the fence home run ball.
The point: effort is hard to define but you know it when you see it, and it looks different in a seven year old than a thirteen year old. As Coach Collins puts it, Caitlin Clark was probably pretty focused at four. Personalities do not change that much.
The parent factor. Coach Bill is blunt that plenty of coaches draft for the parents. If you know a parent is going to be difficult all season, that is a real consideration when you are volunteering your time. It has nothing to do with the kid, and it is still a factor.
Fit with your style. Go in knowing what you value. If you love ball handlers, look for ball handlers. If you are defensive minded, find kids who play that way. The free rubric on the site lets you check boxes and weight what matters most to you, which keeps you organized instead of reacting to whoever scored last.
Keep everybody moving. Same rule as practice. In a ninety minute to two hour window, there should always be something happening.
Chunk the group. Coach Bill sometimes has a couple hundred kids in one gym. Start everyone together, then split into rough A, B, and C groups so kids are competing against similar ability. Then move kids between courts to test them: try this one up on court one and see how it looks.
A little gamesmanship. Coach Collins will sometimes put the obvious top one or two players down on the B or C floor, because he already knows they are on the team and he needs his eyes on the ten kids he is unsure about. He never does it to a single kid, always three or four, so nobody reads too much into it. Coach Bill's warning: watch the parents' reaction.
Numbers and pins. Number every kid on the way in. Use running bibs or pinned numbers like a cross country meet, and be warned, getting them pinned on and keeping them on is one of the hardest logistical parts of the day. Run two sets of numbers so one group is getting pinned while the group on the floor is already running. And make absolutely sure the roster matches the numbers, so number ten on the floor is the kid every coach thinks it is. Mix ups happen.
Get volunteers. The more helping hands on the logistics, the better the whole day goes.
Bring in independent evaluators. This is the piece both coaches feel strongest about. Use someone with no kid in that grade: a parent from an older grade, a high school player, anyone with experience and no stake. Their job is to rank the players one through X, and their ranking is the final word. Coaches do their own ranking alongside, which gives them their draft board, but the independent evaluator settles the disputes and decides who lands on the A team versus the B team. Coach Bill's program used that split for their American and National teams. Coach Collins' feeder program did the same thing for one reason: take the parents out of it. Better for everybody.
Watch, do not run, if you can. If you get to pick your team, hand the whistle to someone else. Coach Collins compares running a tryout while evaluating to teaching a class and grading the test at the same time. You cannot do both well.
Plan for the kids who cannot make it. Someone is always sick, at football, or just back to school. Decide in advance whether you offer a makeup day, and consider running more than one date. Coach Collins' youth theater program runs four days across a couple of weeks for exactly this reason.
What to do when you have to cut kids, and how to handle it well.
Decide what you value before you walk in, find out who is actually going to show up, put an independent evaluator in charge of the rankings, and keep the gym moving. The free tryout and evaluation package on the site gives you the practice plan and the rubric to do all of it.
Learn more and get everything you need for your season at TeachHoops.com
First, know what kind of tryout you are inWhat the coaches look forHow to run the tryout itselfComing next weekCoach's takeaway
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
